Like many of the Windrush generation, my mother, Etta Khwaja, who has died aged 88, went to Britain to train to be a nurse. She became a deputy headteacher and a long-serving community leader in Haringey, north London.
Born in Lititz in St Elizabeth parish, Jamaica, to Vera (nee Stephenson) and William Parchment, both smallholder farmers, Etta left home in 1954 as a 20-year-old and in London met and married, in 1955, Wazir Khwaja. Etta worked initially as a nurse, and she and her husband went on to have eight children.
